On a warm, slightly overcast Tuesday morning at the end of November, I go to the Haymarket Café in Northampton to meet with local writer Sally Bellerose. She’s the author of the acclaimed 2011 novel The Girl’s Club and numerous short stories, mostly involving themes of gender, class, religion, and illness, among other things.

The café, which is deceptively large compared to its tiny and easy-to-miss entryway, is slow. A few silent, solitary customers populate the narrow top floor, immersed in work. The classic soul singer Sam Cooke plays over the speakers, occasionally interrupted by the high pitch of the espresso maker. While I’m waiting, an elderly couple sits down behind me and grumbles for a minute or two about the grand jury decision in the Darren Wilson case. They go silent once, I presume, their coffee has cooled down enough to drink it. Opened over 20 years ago, The Haymarket has become a something like a symbol of the community. At least one of Bellerose’s characters, having struggled to make a living in Chicopee, seems to think it would be an unrealistic expectation to ever own a house in Northampton. But nonetheless, the author does now lives here.

The Girl’s Club is a realistic but fictional novel set in Chicopee, MA. It vividly depicts the real pressures felt by young American women, especially poor, gender-nonconforming women, as they grow up, look for jobs, navigate religion, and are pressured into starting families. Beginning in high school, it stars Cora Rose, a young woman born to a Catholic family. She also has a painful and debilitating bowel condition, [spoilers ahead] for which she eventually has to undergo a complex surgical procedure. But well before that, she accidentally gets pregnant and marries her future child’s father, somebody she doesn’t really love, long before she ever envisioned getting married. To complicate matters, she’s not sure she’s interested in guys at all, having had a brief but intense, intimate encounter with a female, childhood friend. As she grows older and takes nursing classes while juggling work and parenting, the local lesbian bar The Girl’s Club and its charismatic cast of regulars begins to hold a certain allure for her, much as she is reluctant to admit it. Along the way, she’s alternatively supported by and argues with her two, very different sisters, Marie and Renee [end spoilers].

At about five minutes past our meeting time, I get a call from Ms. Bellerose on my cell phone. Apparently, we’ve been sitting at opposite ends of the room waiting for each other. At the same time, we both say we’ll head over to the other’s table, and end up sitting back down at our own tables to wait. Thirty seconds later, we’ve managed to sort things out, choosing to sit further away from the noisy espresso maker.

How much of The Girl’s Club is based on real experiences?

That is the number one question I get asked. I always say something sarcastic like 11.2%. If we’re talking broad strokes, much of it is based on my life. I had a brother who’s not represented in the book. I was not pregnant when I got married. But I was married to a man, we did have some arguments, ha, but the man the protagonists marries in the novel is very different from the man I married and the situations the characters find themselves in are fictional. I am queer, I did lose my colon. And so the bones of the story, if not the specifics, are based in fact.And The Girl’s Club?

The Girl’s Club was a real bar.So it’s not open anymore?

No, I went with a friend to look for it about five years ago. Some of the people hanging around told us that it’s been gone for maybe five years. I had gone to the Girls Club, maybe fifteen years ago, and it was still there in the back of a nondescript building in Chicopee.

Someone told me it was on a list of lesbian bars with the best names.

Yeah, it’s a great name.

The bartender Darlene wasn’t real was she? I thought she seemed like a real, sort of local personality.

No, she was based on somebody real. But characters take on their own lives and personalities once you start writing and put them in a story. It’s all fiction. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Did you really work as a nurse?

Yeah. I was a nurse for 26 years.

Were you writing during that time?

I was. I used to stick a pad under the Kardex and scribble stuff. Because nurses have so much free time. She laughs ironically.

Were you publishing at that point?

I was publishing in small presses. My first publication was in 1991. I edited a small press called Oregeny Press with Susan Stinson and Janet Aalfs.

Did you find it hard to balance writing and work?

Oh no, I didn’t [balance]. I worked my buns off. I had my son. The protagonist in The Girls Club also has a son, so that is another part of the book that somewhat parallels my life. But I didn’t balance writing and work, I wrote when I could steal a moment. I had no balance. It was all work, work.

Were you always writing about themes of feminism and gender? [Or] Addressing those themes?

Yeah, addressing those themes and other themes, as well. I have a half-written novel based on my job as a nurse working at Monson Developmental Center in Palmer, Massachusetts. That novel deals with race and disability. That institution has closed. I write a lot stories based on what I see and live in everyday life, short stories inspired by family and friends , stories about stories that other people tell me, or, sometimes just wild imaginings that come from who knows where?. But usually there’s an underlying theme. You write about your belief system, or anyway, I seem to .

You know it’s an interesting question because I don’t typically go to church, not that I wouldn’t. I think “Catholic” means both the religious aspect and the cultural aspect. “Practicing Catholic” always makes me laugh. Makes me smile. I was raised to be a Catholic. When I was formed, that’s what was given to me and taught to me. So, culturally, I’ll always be Catholic or, at least, always have been raised Catholic. I’ve been published in Catholic magazines. I apparently have that aesthetic. I recently had a story accepted to Dappled Things” a Catholic literary magazine. They were looking for stories that exemplified grace. I remembered grace as a glimpse of something divine, love or clemency from the harshness of life, those times when you feel transcendence coming from somewhere outside yourself. I think Catholic teaching would call the somewhere outside yourself God. Some people know I’m Catholic even when I don’t mention it.

Do you find it difficult to balance traditional Catholic beliefs [with your life]?

My god, yes. You know you have to like this new pope. He’s way ahead of his predecessors, but he has miles to go.

A lot of The Girl’s Club depicts Western Mass, which today has this sort of reputation for being very queer-friendly, at least the Valley does…

Yeah, right, the Valley does.

Do you think that’s a newer thing?

When I was growing up, I thought Northampton was much more liberal than Holyoke where I was born. When it was time, decades ago at least, to vote on domestic partnership, this was, of course before marriage equality, Chicopee and Palmer voted in Civil Unions before Northampton did. In Western Mass, at least for many of the people I know, there has always been a Yankee sensibility that says yes there are weirdoes, there are queers and we don’t necessarily have to like them, but, this individual freedom trumps that dislike, not in a not in a liberal way, more in a belief thatpeople had the right to be left alone.

So you said you were born in Holyoke, but did you grow up in Chicopee?

Yes.

One of the things that TGC depicted was young adults struggling to enter the workforce, [while also] coming out. Do you think young people today have similar or different challenges?

Every generation thinks the younger generation is better off and worse off. Financially, certainly as far as working class kids trying to get an education goes, this generation is worse off . When I went to nursing school it was about 250 bucks a semester and tuition was paid. There were all kinds of grants and scholarships. There were hoops to jump through, but if you could pass the test and move your case forward, school was paid for. That’s how I became a nurse. Even my books were paid. I don’t think you find that now.

I think I read somewhere that textbooks are 800% more expensive now.

Yeah, it’s insane.

So you just had a story accepted to “Saints and Sinners” I believe?

Yes, I won the Saints and Sinners Fiction Award and they published my story titled Corset.

So now it’s included in a collection?

Yes, and I got a trip to New Orleans. I love New Orleans. Oh my god, go to New Orleans. Sex, religion, Catholicism and Voodoo, class, race, a city alive with it all, struggling and surviving. Lots of grace in New Orleans.

So that’s out now?

Yes. It’s an anthology of fiction titled Saints and Sinners.

Is there like a theme for that anthology?

It’s LGBTQAI however many letters we use now. I like the term queer – inclusive without being cumbersome. “Saints and Sinners” is broadly the theme.

So you’re working on a novel?

I am.

What’s that about?

I have my little sentence about it. It’s called Fishwives. It’s about old women behaving badly. I’m working with themes of class and aging. The main characters, two women who are a couple for sixty years , are in their 90s by the last chapter. They meet in ‘56. So that’s really fun, I was born in ‘51 so I don’t remember ‘56. They meet in their twenties. The first few chapters introduce the characters as young women, but the book, as a whole deals mostly with the women when they are elderly.

So is that going to be a longer book?

I think so.

Sounds interesting. I love stories that take place over lifetimes, or even generations.

They say “write what you want to read.”

What draws you to that theme?

Getting old. Age heightens the whole class thing, particularly if you don’t have enough money. Luckily, I’m fine financially, but see some of my older friends struggling. It’s hard to poor when you’re young, and may be harder to be poor when you’re old. It’s just interesting to just be here at sixty-three and remember how things were and how they could be. Aging is very strange.

What authors do you like to read? Were there any that were influential, formative, or inspiring?

Well Joan Nestle, a lot of her early class/lesbian stuff was a revelation to me. Susan Stinson is a good friend of mine and I love her work. I love Toni Morrison and Denis Johnson and Marilynn Robinson. And of course Flannery O’Conner.

Any advice for young aspiring writers trying to find their place in the world?

Yeah. Send stuff out. When it comes back rejected, look at it, maybe rework it and send it out again.

My mother is an escort and an adult-actress, not a prostitute, call girl, hooker, whore, porn star, or streetwalker. Yes, she has a website and no, you can’t have the address.

An escort doesn’t trade money for sex. She makes her living exercising the cliché “time is money.” One hour, $500. You’ve got to get in touch with her through her website or from a referral. You can’t call an agency or drive real slow by her on the right street. She’s an entrepreneur, complete with an appointment book and a client list. Her price is non-negotiable, you pay for perfection. She’s not on drugs, and she doesn’t have to meet you. She’s not a classless call girl or a filthy prostitute. See the difference? It’s there, most of the time.

Perfect moms don’t exist. Now that I’m thinking about motherhood, I realize that it’s not “I hope I don’t screw up my kids,” but “I wonder what my kids will have to go to therapy for?”

Being fat and an adolescent girl at the same time was hard until I found out that my mom was an escort. My friends and I would sit on my bed after school and read magazines. We’d read about the ways to pleasure a man and how to dress for your body type. I had to look at the “apple shape” section. We all knew the hourglass shape was the best to have. The best way to dress for your shape was to trick men into thinking that you had an hourglass shape by directing attention to your boobs and butt while distracting from your waist. By the time you were undressed, he’d be so excited by the ice cubes you put in your mouth before blowing him that he wouldn’t care what you looked like, at least for the next twenty minutes.

But my mother was an apple, and men wanted her. They called her begging to see her for just an hour. They could afford anything, even hourglasses. I threw away the magazines and used ice to cool drinks. I was the crispiest apple.

I remember the guy who told me that I looked just like my mother, staring at me but never making eye contact. I came home too early. I wanted to cut open his scrotum, but I smiled and walked away as he turned to watch. He paid for my new school supplies and clothes.

Jake, the one that pays her rent and my college tuition, quietly leaves envelopes fat with cash on my Mother’s dresser for the privilege of being her boyfriend. He’s nice enough; he waited until I was twenty-one to ask if he could rent me. It could be very profitable, being the child of an escort and adult actress. One of her photographers offered me $600 to take my shirt off and ride a mechanical bull for a crowd on camera. I almost said yes but wrote a bucket list instead: 1) Ride a mechanical bull. Saying no to people offering to pay me $500 an hour has become a reflex. “No” has to be reflexive. “Rent is due”, “I need health insurance”, “It might be interesting.” These responses are slower, less practiced than “No thank you Sir.”

Max was the first person I met who had a poor, black daddy and a rich, white mommy. He lived on a farm down the road and was the only person who wasn’t black or white but black and white. I thought he was sent from heaven or made up in a lab, he had a divine destiny to teach us all that we were just people. We were both defined by who our parents were. Bastard. Oreo. Slut. I hoped that as racism became a four-letter word maybe people would see that I wasn’t just an escorts’ daughter; I was a women, a unique apple, alive.

My mom hates her job. Maybe that’s why we’re both rich and poor, not in between but both. She always works just enough but not more. She loses friends when they find out; she lies to protect my grandma. Grandma knows, she knows we know she knows, we don’t talk about it. When pressed, my mother says she is in “advertising” and changes the subject. A good escort knows how to manipulate any situation. She would make a good politician.

The neighbors notice the expensive cars parked outside our cozy two-bedroom attic apartment. They watch the men come out alone, negotiate the cracked sidewalk and stay in sixty-minute increments. A fog of sex hangs outside the door; you can smell it for miles. The neighbors grow pot and trade it for the essentials. They don’t talk about what they see to my mother because she is too proud, but they ask me questions when they think my guard is down. My lies are impenetrable, but I wish they wouldn’t ask me things they already know. They accept it because we’re good neighbors but I have to come over to their house to play, their children aren’t allowed in mine.

At nineteen I tried to be gay, but I wasn’t. Then I tried to be asexual. Men were giving, and I took. I loved what they gave me, the attention, the privilege, the things. I loved feeling the unique shape of their cocks for the first time. I felt richer with each new fuck.

My mother says she’s an international model and a sex therapist. She’s kept marriages alive. She always says, “Men need to cheat, they’re hunters. They need to marry Mother Mary and fuck Mary Magdalene.” She says they do things to her that they would never do to their wives. My boyfriend can’t understand why I want an open relationship. I don’t want him to have to cheat. He squeezes me tight to his chest and tells me that not all men cheat, that I’m all he needs. I’m trying to be both the virgin and the slut. I’m starting to realize that we’re different, my partner and I. He says we’re not our gender, we’re all just people. Maybe in Vermont, but where I come from even heaven-sent-black-and-white-people have gender. It’s inescapable.

Sometimes when the rent is due and there aren’t any groceries in the house, I can feel my resources rotting. This $8.50/ hour job isn’t worth it. I am my mothers’ secretary. When someone asks, “Do you speak Russian?” I know it has nothing to do with Russia. The cops she gives discounts to tell her where and when. It’s more of a struggle to not become an escort than to become one.

I want. I want individually packaged yogurt with fruity flavors and meat that isn’t the Manager’s Special. I want silky, black underthings with triple digit price tags. I want to separate twenties into piles of five like my mother and I used to.

But my mother said she’d kill me. She wouldn’t, she would tell my dad, and he would beat me into applesauce. My future degree will be their proudest achievement. I want it too, now that it might be too late. They sent me to college where it’s always winter, so I’ll never want to take my clothing off. I have to become a doctor, so I can save her from her choices. I have to build a big house with an addition. She sleeps with strangers so I can go to college, so she can stop sleeping with strangers. When I told her I was getting a degree in literature, she started a second job selling used books.

The refuse of my disease isn’t orange pill bottles or syringes. You won’t find used needles or vials on the floor or in my pockets. You won’t find anything, but if you could, you’d see only fat bottles—emptied. The big bottles wait for me at the store. They hold amber liquid, which sloshes inside as I drive us up the mountain. I park outside my apartment and the bottle is in my hand, the liquid eagerly falling from bottle to body. At the store, there are small bottles too. I don’t know why anyone bothers with them. Only alcoholics in recovery buy the small bottles. They’re trying to limit themselves. When I see them in the morning at the liquor store, I think of them as starving rich men who choose to have just a snack. They must enjoy the torture of limiting what their body begs for. Poor bastards, cheers to them and again, and once more, and again—Cheers.

I say, enjoy the disease. Feel the clean blood move from the dialysis machine to your body, and be thankful for the feeling that others take for granted. Have you ever been controlled by something? If I don’t drink, my hands shake and my head throbs, but I don’t remember when that happened last; I’m proactive.

And all that shit that everyone worries about—mortgage bills, burial plots, birthday presents—none of it matters. Those people are always standing at the edge of the cliff trying their best to slowly back away. Jump off and fall with me. Once I lost my address, I stopped receiving bills. Eventually, my debt got so big it became fantastical—a big, green unicorn with magical numbers that only multiply. “HOLIDAY SPECIAL: 2 Liters 4 the price of 1!!!” = double the pleasure. I can do math too.

At first, I only drank on weekends, but Friday is almost the weekend too, right? Then there was Thirsty Thursday, Whiskey Wednesday, and Tequila Tuesday. Eventually, I found Margarita Monday, but by then, I only drank rum from the bottle. One night, not so long ago in a cabin right down the woods and up a trail, I drank two jugs of cheap wine, smoked too many joints, and tried to join the fire that we were all huddled around. I wanted to feel myself leap and dance like the flames, wanted to warm everyone as I consumed downed trees and dried leaves. I wanted to incarnate as God’s destructive force. I knew my wine soaked flesh would burn, my physical being might’ve even vaporized. As I was warming up to the idea, feeling the heat against my flesh, someone told me it was time to come inside, and I focused on standing instead.

On bent knees, I confessed my latest sins to the toilet in the morning. My boater buddy showed up then and demanded that I go kayaking with him (he didn’t know he was karma’s tool for the day). I told him I’d be there if I could lift my head. He told me I’d be there. Forty-five minutes and five tries later, I stood, walked into the kitchen, and pounded water. The shrill of his truck’s horn cut through the soft mush of my brain, but I was dressed, as ready as I could be. I slept beside him as he, determined, drove to a river that was too close. Later, he told me that this was part of my training—realizing that I can kayak in any condition, and that the river is more important than the amber liquid and green grass that left me in this shape. Maybe that was a part of his motivation, or maybe he just wanted to paddle.

We say we’re kayaking addicts, but what do we mean? Are we controlled by kayaking like one can be controlled by drugs? “I’m Morgan and I’m an alcoholic, addict, compulsive overeater, and aqua-holic.” Maybe we just mean we’re passionate. “I’m Morgan, and I’m passionate about booze, drugs, food, and kayaking.”

I took risks on the river, so, I didn’t need to drink then. Besides, the sun rays, indirectly angled on the Vermont river, were too bright; I was the equator’s temporary replacement on my first hour on the job.

Sigmund Freud said we’re all moths mesmerized by the light, flying into our own fiery destruction. He probably thought this death drive idea up while bent over—his nose above the powdery line, his whole body inhaling. I’ll never trust an addict, so I know he’s full of it, but maybe there’s some small truth in just this one Freudian “phallacy.”

A few cult members of Alcoholics Anonymous agree with him, but I don’t trust them either. They’re the kind of people that make small kids wear elbow pads; they sand down all the sharp points. Did you know that addiction is a disease? Just like Spina bifida, you’re born with it. You wouldn’t yell at someone for having been born with diabetes, would you? Of course not, unless you were born a dick. Maybe that’s a disease too.

We all like the sharp edges, those rough pieces that remind us that we can die because we’re mortal, vulnerable, and weak; the pinching possibilities that let us know we’re alive. Sanding them smooth doesn’t make the longing go away, so, why bother? I walk by those pieces and feel the rough spots playfully bite and tear my flesh. Once the adrenaline hits my heart, I don’t even feel the pain until it wears off, and I touch the scars with pride and longing. After Freud’s body rotted, people started listening to him. They call the death drive “Thanatos.” It’s why we take risks and work for our own destruction, they say.

I take risks to realize that I’m more than the soft mush of my body and to remind myself that that is all I am. The first time I drank, I woke up with my brain trying to hammer its way out of my skull, and I couldn’t even remember a second of the last twelve hours; one bottle and I disappeared from myself. Paddling too, what’s weaker then a gill-less pile of flesh and bones trying to move in the flow of twelve thousand pounds of water a second? I express myself by learning to work with the flow that dwarfs me and thrashes me indifferently, by finding a way to be a part of the river, not fighting against it.

My body habituates to risk, so I have to take bigger and bigger risks to get the same orgasmic off that I once got just by paddling a class two rapid or slowly sipping from a small bottle. Eventually, the bottles and my sips got bigger, and soon I’d blackout before I got off. Consequences were all I remembered. The cliché consequences that every addict talks about came first. Bright sirens and pressed uniforms, the first rape, the subsequent anger. Time travel was my favorite. I’d drink and then hours flew. Sometimes I even teleported. I’d wake up next to a stranger in a strange house. I got good at detective work. How do I get home? Where am I? Who is he? I even got a Sherlock Holmes pipe, because I kept waking up as the star of my own detective novel.

I was numbed to this, chasing the off I knew I couldn’t get anymore. Then the bad became too bad to ignore. My friends disappeared halfway through the handle, and only came back when I was sober. I avoided them, and everyone else. I tried to assault the cops and punched my mother. I took risks without seriously considering the consequences and broke my own safety rules on the river. None of that was enough. I spent more time in a dry bathtub crying then in class or studying. Movement was impossible, sleep was the only relief I could find. Drink, don’t drink, a little, a lot? I was stuck, knee deep in the thick shit of my disease. So, I started listening to all the wisdom around me and went to the place most likely to help me get sober: the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first night I went, I went home with a cheap plastic chip and a mind full of questions. All the answers, I was told, were in a big blue book.

We don’t talk about it, but I know as well as anything why we struggle. We’ve lived, and now we’re asked to just exist. Have you ever felt vulnerable and alive? Time slows down, your heart beat speeds up, you can feel each movement of your every cell, and your whole body responds purposefully. The next second is the most important one of your life and the last was your most terrified and most grateful. When it ends, you’re consumed—by pain, love, passion, purpose, something. How can you describe those intense moments of really living?

Three years earlier: the earth drops away and I’m carried by rushing current. I swing into an eddy, using a stroke I’ve never seen before, and suddenly the paddle is me and I am the flow. I am the river, and I am nothing.

One year earlier: It was my first class-four rapid ,and I was drunk. My buddy followed behind me, in a truck tire tube, holding a kayak paddle—a directionless beetle with a death wish. The two in front were stoned, but they still waited at the bottom. We both swam, of course. My body managed to take the perfect, most painless line. I was circulating in a keeper hole for too long. My body went up to the surface, and sometimes I caught a single breath before I was dragged back to the bottom. Underwater, I reached toward what I thought was the shoreline, but felt air. Finally, I managed to find left and reached for any small stream of water that wasn’t the hole. I don’t know if I found one, but my boat was waiting for me in an eddy and my paddle was in my hand at the bottom. My buddy wasn’t so lucky. I watched his large frame bounce over huge rocks and tumble in the rough spots. His tube took a better line and gracefully swirled below the rapid. I remember every second that I scouted and every other moment of my swim. I can still taste the PBR and fear sliding down my throat before I decided to make the run. If I close my eyes, I can look up at the diagonal reactionary wave that flipped me. It is easily one of my favorite moments. I drank a forty on the way up the mountain and knew that I had earned life and appreciated it, finally, because I found it’s perfect mixer: risk with a dash of destruction.

The cult of Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t allow mixers; you’ve got to take everything straight. After three months of reading the program-approved literature, studying the meetings, and trying to understand the vocabulary, I started asking questions. “If God is a higher power as I understand him, why is he male and why do we say Christian prayers at the end of every meeting? Why do we update the literature for racist language but not sexist?”

The group guru told me, “I’ve never met someone too stupid to get sober but I have met people who were too smart. Jesus was Jewish, and he said the Lord’s Prayer.” Shut up and accept it. He used to be a preacher but has moved onto more lucrative work. I wonder if he considers Martin Luther a Catholic.

I didn’t know how to understand without asking questions. It felt like trying to describe colors without sight. But he was sober and I was struggling, so I stopped asking questions and started melting into the pot. I was an alcoholic and an addict. I couldn’t trust my mind because it was infected with alcoholism, which spoke louder than my self, they told me. I drank the Kool Aide and waited for relief.

My mother is racist, but she thinks of herself as a positive racist, “Irish men are best in bed unless you just want to be pounded, then go for a black man. Romanians are the best to work with, but if you want to have fun play soccer with the Mexicans. And for marriage, go Jewish. They treat their women the best. White men are boring, but they’re the best at eating pussy. And honey, never marry an Indian— your alcoholism would surely be passed to a feather headed baby, and you’d divorce a man with a dot the first chance you got.”

It’s with my mother’s voice that I read the AA Big Book, the central text that they say has all the answers, and all of the other AA literature. It’s epic—some tale written in some far away time complete with, “ the double edged sword of alcoholism,” and “our ancient enemy rationalization.” Most of all, the literature is sexist, racist and homophobic. It tells us that “every normal human being wants to find a member of the opposite sex and have children.” It even has a “Chapter to the Housewives.” The housewives, of course, aren’t alcoholic themselves. They are wives of alcoholics, bitter and jealous of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is able to save their husbands when they couldn’t. The literature means well, maybe. I still have to confront sexism in the room to get my medicine. And the next man who touches me while calling me beautiful before he gives me advice on how to stay sober is going to have to regurgitate his dick in the back of an ambulance and hope they reattach it in time.

Does alcoholics anonymous really save us from our addiction or are we just substituting something that might kill us tomorrow for something that might kill us in five years? Dave, thirty-five years sober, still sticks himself into anything with a pulse, and Sharon seems to survive on a constant flow of sugar. At meetings, she adds bite after bite onto her three hundred pound frame. Who among us could keep their coffee cup in the cabinet “one day at a time?” And if you’re ever unsure of where the meeting is, just look for the smokers. Outside every AA meeting is a crowd of people sucking down carbon monoxide and tar, trying to feel something, maybe nothing, or bring themselves closer to the end. Joe says he’s good at “changing seats on the Titanic.” He used to be morbidly obese and wishes he was asexual because then he could “ have a fucking second to think about something else,” and just quit smoking, again.

Because I needed to stop drinking and I didn’t know any other way but AA, I devoted myself to the insanity of abstaining from my lover, alcohol, and following the Big Book. Even with all its faults, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me: I love Big Brother.

***

On a serious side note: Alcoholics Anonymous literally saved my life. Don’t let this piece keep you away from the program. If you’re struggling you should check it out and make your own opinions.

“I need a good book.” Mary Jane Russell stared at the graying part at the top of her mother’s head, a dull line between the tightly permed blonde curls on the rest of her head. They were in Betty Russell’s dining room having their Friday night tuna, egg noodles, and cheese casserole. Betty used her fork to scrape a shred of tuna from between her teeth, speaking as she did.

“I don’t get your fascination with books. Television and movies were good enough for your father and me.”

“I remember you reading,” Mary Jane said.

Betty rolled her eyes. “Your father enjoyed a few books, as do I—and of course, we read our Bibles.” Scooping a spoonful of saltine cracker crumbs from the top of the casserole bowl, she blew on them before placing it on her tongue. “Are you looking for fact or fiction?”

“My book club members don’t care for non-fiction.”

“Then why did you ask for my advice?”

“I wasn’t asking for advice. I was commenting on my need to find a book to recommend for next week’s meeting.”

“I think reading a book every week is a bit taxing. You’ve got your real estate business to think about, and the others in your group have jobs and responsibilities. Some of them have children. They were fruitful and multiplied.” Betty drew in her lips and narrowed her eyes as she watched her daughter push a chunk of tuna around her plate with her fork.

Mary Jane lowered her head for a moment, then raised her eyes and looked across the table at Betty. “Reading a good book is balm for the soul, Mother, and the book club is good for business. It’s all part of networking. Jane Corson is a real estate lawyer, and Sandy Perkins works with new employees at the university. They’re both good contacts for my agency.”

Betty sighed. “Jesus is balm enough for the soul.Your father and I never let reading get out of hand, and why join a club? If you read a book, read it quietly, keep it to yourself, and attend to business.”

Betty arched her eyebrows and leaned toward Mary. “Your father was a man of substance and faith.”

Mary Jane looked at her mother in silence.

They ate tuna casserole. Their forks clicking against the plates were the only sound in the room. After several minutes, Betty left the table. Mary Jane continued to eat as she stared at the print of Currier and Ives’ “Home for Thanksgiving” on the wall behind where her mother had been sitting. Faded, the glass dusty, it had once hung on her grandmother’s dining room wall beside a copy of the Lord’s Prayer. She had been looking at it for as long as she could remember.

Betty returned with a book and handed it to Mary Jane. “Your father was reading this book when he passed on. He kept it on the back of the toilet in his bathroom.”

“Inside the Crosshairs: Snipers in Vietnam. “Daddy read this?”

“Religiously, a few pages every morning as he went about his business in there.”

Opening the book to the first chapter, Mary Jane read aloud. “‘All in a Day’s Work: The Single Well-Aimed Shot.’ That’s a chilling title for a chapter.”

“Borrow it if you’d like,” Betty said. “Your father said it was chapter and verse on how to be a good sniper. He wished there’d been a book like that when he was over there.”

Mary Jane continued reading. “‘In terms of economics, the innovative use of snipers in Vietnam meant that nearly every bullet produced a body count—a statistic drastically different from bullet to body ratios for other wars…’ I don’t think my book club would care for this.” Closing the book with a loud clap, she slid it toward her mother.

“Just leave it on the table, dear. I’ll put it back in your father’s bathroom after we do the dishes.”

“He’s been dead for five years and it’s still his bathroom?”

“I have mine, he has his. There’s no reason to take his away from him.”

“He’s dead, Ma. He’s not coming back. The dead stay dead.”

“I don’t need two bathrooms. I leave his just as it was the last time he used it: the toilet lid up, his toothbrush on the side of the sink, and that book on the back of the toilet tank. Besides, Lazarus came back. Jesus raised him up. The Bible says the saved will arise on the Day of Judgment and ascend into Heaven singing and dancing and clapping. We’ll follow Jesus up a golden staircase to the foot of God’s throne and sing his praises for eternity. It’s possible that between the time Jesus resurrects your father and the time we follow him up the golden staircase, your father will need to go to the bathroom. It will be a comfort to him to find it just as he left it, with a full roll of toilet paper and a good book to read.”

“I don’t think the Bible says anything about singing and dancing and following Jesus up a golden staircase.” Mary Jane covered her mouth with her hand. She didn’t like the idea of spending eternity singing praises to anyone or anything, but there was nothing to be gained by arguing with her mother. There was certainly nothing but a whirlwind to reap by telling her that making a shrine out of her husband’s bathroom was pathetic. There was a time when she would have started an argument, one that would have ended with her mother shouting, crying, and going into her bedroom. She would slam the door and stay until Mary Jane went home, or to a bar where she’d get drunk and complain about her mother to anyone who would listen.

It was after such an evening ten years earlier that she had driven across the Connecticut River into Turners Falls, ending up at a bar where she had spent hours washing shots of Jim Beam down with pints of beer. Later, driving back to Greenfield, she swerved to avoid a coyote standing in the middle of the road and crashed into a tree, totaling her car. She woke up in the hospital, a deep gash on her right cheek and her left leg missing from just above the knee. Now, by putting her hand over her mouth, she was telling herself to shut up and to allow Betty to see a smile when she lowered her hand. It was too costly to get worked up.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter as long as you’ve got your bathroom and don’t need Daddy’s.”

“I’ve no use for it.” Patting the sniper book, she sighed. “I still read books, sometimes.”

“What’s the last book you read, Ma?”

Betty clicked a spoon against the edge of the dish, her brow wrinkled, and took a deep breath. “Plumb Stupid, or something like that.”

“How was it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t remember. Plumb stupid, probably.”

They laughed and cleared the table. When the dishwasher was loaded and running, Mary Jane pulled on her jacket and kissed her mother’s cheek.

“Next Friday?”

Betty smiled. “Next Friday. Do you have a date tonight?”

Mary Jane shook her head. “No. I’ll go down to the Pint, have a beer, and listen to whoever’s playing music.”

“Don’t drive if you have more than one beer.”

Mary Jane patted her prosthesis. “I’ll park at home and walk downtown.”

§§§

She stood at the entrance to the People’s Pint brew pub. Five fiddlers, a mandolin player and a guitarist at the rear of the room were playing French-Canadian tunes. There were no open stools at the bar, and all the tables were taken.

“It’ll be twenty, twenty-five minutes before I can seat you,” the hostess said—Angela, according to the plastic badge on her t-shirt.

Mary Jane sighed. “I think I’ll go home.”

Angela pointed to a small round table where a man sat alone. “You could sit with Dr. Sawey. He teaches at the community college, and he’s by himself.”

“I don’t know him.”

Angela pointed at two full tables. “Those people didn’t know each other when they came in, but they all wanted to eat and drink and listen to the music, and I convinced them to sit together. They seem to be enjoying themselves. Dr. Sawey doesn’t bite, and he isn’t a lecher, in spite of the way he looks.”

Mary Jane shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

“I’ll introduce you to him. What’s your name?”

“Mary Jane.” She followed Angela and stood beside her at Sawey’s table.

“Hi, Dr. Sawey. This is Mary Jane. Can she join you?”

“Sure.” Sawey stood and gestured for Mary Jane to sit. Tall and thin, she thought his wing bones looked as though they might cut through the back of his shirt. In his mid to late sixties, he was bearded, his hair pulled back in a gray ponytail, his shirt open to the third button, and there was a small POW/MIA pin on his breast pocket—a medallion with what appeared to be a cross embossed on it hung from a silver cord around his neck.

She sat and Angela handed her a menu.

“How’re you doing, Ange?” Sawey said.

“Doin’,” she said.

“The divorce go through?”

“Six months ago.”

“The kids?”

“With the creep. I see them Saturday afternoons for two hours.”

“How’s that going?”

“I can’t be with them without a social worker in the room.”

“It’ll get better.”

“Yeah, right.” She gave him a quick smile and walked back to her stand by the entrance.

“Ted Sawey,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Mary Jane Russell.” She looked at his medallion.

He held it out for her inspection. “You think it’s a cross, right?”

Mary Jane’s face felt warm.

“Most people do at first glance. It’s a T, for Theodore. There’s no way I’d wear a cross.”

She was about to say ‘if it walks like a cross and quacks like a cross’ when the waiter came. She ordered a turkey burger and pale ale. By the time the waiter left, she had decided her comment was better left unsaid.

“The hostess said she’d had a Lit. class with you.”

“Angela,” he said. “Good student the first semester, burned out the second. Her husband left, took the kids. She was drunk and drugged up for months. Got an A the first semester, flunked the second. I helped her get into rehab.”

“Do you give that kind of help to all your students?”

He made an evil smile. “Just the ones I want to have sex with.”

She puffed air and shook her head. “You’re that kind of professor?”

Sawey laughed. “No. I wanted to see your reaction. That’s the kind of professor I am. I say outrageous things and sit back to watch peoples’ expressions.”

“Why?”

He was silent for a moment. “I suppose because if they were true, I’d be more interesting than I am, and I’d get laid more.”

“You’re not interesting?”

“I don’t find myself interesting.”

“What does interest you?”

“Books. Writers. Students.”

“Students you can screw?”

“You’re a piece of work, Mary Jane.” He smiled. “I’m interested in students who show promise and progress. students I can help grow.”

“You’re an altruist.”

He shook his head. “I’m a teacher.”

“Maybe an English professor is just what I need.”

He laughed. “That’s something I’ve never heard anyone say. Why?”

“I’m the president of the Greenfield Saturday Night Book Club.”

“President? A book club needs a president?”

“Somebody has to organize things.”

“Then call yourself Convener, or Secretary, or Club Chair. Anything but President.”

“What’s wrong with President?”

“You’re asking for a lecture.”

“So lecture me.”

He cleared his throat. “Presidents like to present themselves as saviors, but they’re all egomaniacs who crave power, demand respect and do anything to get their way. Presidents of powerful nations or self-proclaimed presidents-for-life who have assumed dictatorial power over people they claim to represent, presidents of tiny island nations, presidents of ivy league universities and rural community colleges, presidents of corporations, city councils, school committees, neighborhood watch associations, presidents of rod and gun clubs, yacht clubs, community cable television stations boards of directors, presidents of Polish-American, Italian-American, Hispanic-American, Sino-American, Irish-American, Afro-American, Mayflower-American, Native-American, Serbo-Croation-American societies, presidents of hospital boards, bar associations, medical associations, teachers unions, prep school boards of trustees, truckers unions, trucking companies, tea parties, presidents of animal rescue centers and country clubs, presidents of legislative bodies and presidents of book clubs; all of them cry ‘respect me’, ‘love me’, ‘obey me’, ‘give me my way because I know what is best for you, my people and the cause I serve. I am your savior, worship me.’ I don’t have much use for saviors.”

Mary Jane choked on her beer laughing. People at the next table applauded.

“You don’t think much of presidents,” she said.

“A president cost me my right leg.” He pulled up the right leg of his jeans to reveal an artificial leg. “Nixon winding down the war in Vietnam did this to me.”

Mary Jane pulled up the left leg of her slacks.

“Damn,” Sawey said.

“Jim Beam and a ’94 Mercury did this to me.

“Whiskey and a god, eh?” Sawey laughed.

Mary Jane smiled. “Besides Nixon, what did it to you?”

“A land mine. Another guy stepped on it, and I was too close. His death saved me, but I paid for it with my right leg.”

“Better that than your right arm.”

Sawey clasped his hands behind his head and chuckled. “Where in the hell did you come from, Ms. Mary Jane?”

“I live within walking distance of this place, on Congress Street.”

“Is walking distance any shorter for you than it is for someone with two natural legs?”

She shook her head. “Is it for you?”

“I run marathons.” He unclasped his hands and let his open palms slap against the table top. “And I live one block away from you on Grinnell Street. How is it that I’ve never seen you?”

“I don’t spend my time with academic types.”

“Smart move. I prefer the company of the maintenance staff to most of my colleagues at the college. Janitors and plumbers and electricians and groundskeepers don’t believe they’re God’s gift to the ignorant. They’re also usually better card players, better deer hunters, better drinkers, and a good many of them are better and smarter people than most of my fellow faculty members. What do you do for a living?”

The waiter brought her turkey burger and pale ale. She answered as she took a bite. “I sell real estate.” She took a card from her purse and laid it on the table.

“Russell Realty, so that’s you? I’ve always liked the alliteration in your company’s name.” He slipped the card in his shirt pocket.

“It was unavoidable.”

“You said maybe I could help you.”

“I need a good book.”

“Most people do, whether they know it or not.”

“My mother tried to push a Vietnam book on me, In Back of the Crossed-eyes, something like that, about snipers in Vietnam.”

“All books are fiction. Everything’s a fiction: history, sociology, psychology, physics, theology, and philosophy, even memory. All fictions. It’s your book club, and you’re the president?”

Mary Jane washed a mouthful of turkey burger down with beer. “It’s not my book club; it’s just a book club, although starting it was my idea, and we’ve been calling me the president since the beginning.” She smiled. “I could be called something else.”

“It doesn’t matter. I like to rant.”

“Any ideas about a book for me?”

“I wrote a novel about Vietnam. It’s my only book. Scribners published it, and it lost a lot of money. Never even made the New York Times Worst Seller list, and it’s long out of print. I’ll give you copies if you think your book club would read it.”

“What’s the title?”

“A Farewell to Glory. It’s derivative. Everything I write is derivative. It’s the fate of the English professor.”

“If we read it, would you come to our meeting?”

He emptied his glass. “Let’s go back to my place.”

She waved a hand in the air near his face. “Why professor Sawey, you’re awfully forward.”

He flushed and shook his head. “For the copies of my novel for your club.”

“What’s it about?”

“Have you read Hemingway?”

“No. He’s too depressing. Wasn’t he hung or something?”

“Probably not well enough to suit him.”

She looked at him in silence.

“Besides,” he said. “It’s ‘hanged’ if you’re talking about a person’s suicide or execution, and how can you say he’s depressing if you’ve never read him?”

“Because he hanged himself.”

“No, he didn’t. He blew his brains out. Suicide’s a Hemingway family tradition.”

“See, depressing. Why would I want to read him?”

“To understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Futility. Despair. Beauty. Clarity. Nothingness. The perfect sentence. The death of God.”

“Futility and despair aren’t good topics for someone who sells real estate, and the death of God certainly isn’t for the Greenfield Saturday Night Book Club.”

“Then you probably wouldn’t like my book. It’s about the same things, just not as well written as Hemingway’s stuff.”

“It would be different.”

“How so?”

“If you would speak to us, we wouldn’t have to like the book so long as we like you.”

“Do you think your members would like me?”

She smiled. “Why wouldn’t they?”

Instead of answering, he asked, “What are the last five books they’ve read and discussed?”

He moved his head from side to side. “They’re all by women. Why make an exception for me?”

“You’re local, and you’re giving us the books.”

“I’ve got five cartons of them that I can’t give away. Having you take them will be like a gift from Heaven.”

“Good. I’ll finish my burger and beer, and we’ll go to your place.”

§§§

“I converted the second and third floors into apartments,” Ted Sawey said as they walked up to a large purple Victorian house. The gingerbread trim was painted the same pink as the trim around the windows and doors. The front door was a brilliant crimson.

“I’ve wondered who lived here,” Mary Jane said.

“Like it?”

“No. Every time I look at that purple, I shudder at the thought of trying to sell it. Especially in today’s market.”

“You hate it.”

“It would be a bear to sell, unless you repainted it.”

“I have no intention of selling it.”

“Are the apartments rented?”

“The second floor’s got three bedrooms. An art professor and her son live there. She uses the third bedroom for a studio. The third floor’s a one bedroom. A local prep school rents it for visiting faculty.”

He opened the front door, and they walked into a large hall lit by a single spiral fluorescent bulb in a ceiling fixture. The staircase to the second floor was on the left and blocked by a door. A second door led to the first floor apartment. Three bicycles were lined up along the walls, secured by chains fastened to a pipe screwed along the top of the wainscoting. Several boxes were piled in one corner, and a series of pegs held jackets and scarves, boots and shoes scattered on the floor below them. Unlocking his door he ushered her into the living room, switching on the lights as they entered.

“It’s beautiful,” she said with surprise, looking at the paintings on the walls, the thick oriental rugs on the floor. Through a wide arch she could see into a study; soft lights shined on a wall of bookcases. “You’d never know it was purple and pink on the outside.”

“Come see the kitchen.” He led her through the study. Three of the walls were covered with crammed bookcases, some with books stacked on top of those that were upright. A light maple desk took up the entire width of the fourth wall. Covered with neat stacks of paper and half a dozen pens carefully lined up, the desk held a computer, its screensaver displaying a changing array of photographs: Tuscan hillside towns, English countryside villages, a series of cathedrals and churches. To the left of the computer was a framed picture of a young man in a graduation robe. Underneath the desk were five unopened cardboard cartons.

Mary Jane pointed to the picture. “That you?”

“My son.” He picked the picture up, running a finger over its surface. “He’s with the Special Forces in Afghanistan. I told him that war was just another president’s folly, but he said he had to go.”

“Why?”

“I suppose to prove something to me.”

“What does his mother think?”

He shrugged and shook his head. “We haven’t spoken in twenty years.”

“Bad divorce?”

He returned the picture to the desk. “She was a nun. I met her when I was teaching in California,” he sighed. “We fell in love. She left the convent, and we spent a year in Paris, another in a Rada, a small town in Tuscany. We came back to the States, and I took a job teaching at a church-related college in upstate New York, figuring it would be an environment in tune with her religious sensibilities. We were happy enough, until she got pregnant. The thought of a baby freaked her out. I mean a total, absolute, mind-boggling freak out. She knelt by the couch in the living room and prayed day and night, wouldn’t eat anything, and drank one glass of water a day. After five days of that, she passed out. When I picked her up to take her to a hospital, her knees were bloody from scraping against the rug. They released her from the hospital, and she disappeared. Seven months later, she showed up at my house with the baby. ‘Take him,’ she said. I never heard from her again.”

“You don’t have any idea what happened to her?”

He shook his head. “For all I know she could be in a convent, be a crack-whore in Salt Lake City, or a literary agent in New York. Let’s look at the kitchen.”

She stepped into the kitchen, exhaling in surprise. “This is beautiful. Even with that god-awful purple paint job, I could sell this house in no time.”

“It’s my sanctum,” he said.

“I see why.”

The floor was made of wide pine boards with a matte polyurethane finish. A large porcelain sink sat beneath a picture window, a stainless steel refrigerator on one side of it, a ten burner commercial cooking range on the other. The tops of the center island and counters were gray polished slate. Above white wainscoting, the walls were painted dusky red, the paintings on them lit by fixtures recessed in the ceiling. A table and chairs sat by a bank of casement windows. An arm chair in one corner faced a flat screen television mounted on the opposite wall. In another corner, a small monkey chattered and jumped around in a cage hanging from a hook in the ceiling, its eyes fixed on Sawey the moment he and Mary Jane entered the room.

“He’s beautiful,” she said, walking toward the monkey.

“Don’t put your fingers near the cage. He bites. He’s quite a nasty little fellow. When I let him out, which I do only when I’m alone and at my most masochistic, he’ll shit wherever he might be when the need comes on. He tears up books and newspapers, pees on my bed, and generally makes a mess of the whole place. If I’m not careful, the little bastard will leap onto my back and hold on to my flesh until it bleeds. I can’t shake him loose until he’s ready to get off. I can jump up and down like a monkey myself, bang up against the wall, and the damned beast will hang on as though there’s a purpose to what he’s doing.”

“I didn’t. My mentor in the doctoral program at Drew University willed him to me.”

“Why keep him?”

“To remind me of what we came from.” He pointed at the cage. The monkey turned around and stuck its ass as far out of the bars as it could. “We evolved from common ancestors, from things a lot like what he still is.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Jesus H. Darwin.”

She laughed. “He really is beautiful.”

‘I hate him.”

“Why?”

“He reminds me of what we came from and what we’ll return to when we devolve. I have fantasies of cutting him up and stuffing him down the garbage disposal.”

Mary Jane gasped. ‘You wouldn’t.”

“I could. I really hate him.”

Jesus chattered and jumped around the cage.

“Someday I’ll shoot him, put my .22 pistol between his eyes, and be done with him.”

Wrapping his fingers around the bars, Jesus shook with a fierceness that made the cage jump and rattle on its chain.

“He heard you,” Mary Jane said with an uncomfortable laugh.

“Sometimes I wake up at those terrible hours of the night and think I hear him out here talking in tongues. I want him gone, dead. I put myself back to sleep imagining that I’m strangling him. If he was gone, perhaps I could forget him, forget what he represents.”

“You’d never forgive yourself.”

“Forgiveness is overrated.”

“I don’t agree.”

“It’s not worth arguing over. Would you like a cup of tea?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got an early morning appointment to show a house. If I don’t get to bed soon, I won’t be at my real estate selling best tomorrow.”

“I’ll get the books.”

She followed him into the study. He pulled a carton from under the desk and ripped it open with a box cutter.

“How many? I’ve got more than I’ll ever be able to get rid of.”

“Would fifteen be all right?”

He took fifteen paperback books from the carton and stacked them in a brown grocery bag. “It’s not a bad book.”

“Maybe the club members who actually read the books we discuss will think it’s a good book,” she said.

“There’s no telling what makes a good book.” He smiled. “You should reconstitute your club so that it doesn’t have a president.”

“We might do that.”

“Presidents come with baggage.”

“Everything comes with baggage.”

He pulled up his trouser leg and rested the heel of his prosthesis on the seat of the desk chair. “Show me your leg again.”

“Don’t you think this is a little odd?” She pulled up her slacks and put her prosthesis next to his.

“Of course. So what?”

She laughed. “When my mother asks me why I don’t date, I tell her that at my age there are more single men than single women. The odds are good but the goods are odd. You’re pretty odd.”

“We haven’t dated yet.”

She picked the box cutter up from the desk, tapped her prosthesis and then tapped his. “We may be pathetic creatures, but we can do pretty neat things. There’s not a monkey in the world that could make a fake leg to stand on.”

“There’s not.” His voice was flat.

She picked up the bag. “I have to go. Is your phone listed?”

“It is.”

“I’ll call you with the date, time, and place of our next book club meeting.”

He opened the doors for her and stood on the porch as she left. Starting down the sidewalk, she turned. “Thanks for the books.”

He waved. “Sure.”

She walked on, and he called to her. “Perhaps I’ll kill little Jesus tonight.”

She turned again, their eyes locking. “How many times have you said that?”

“Every night but one for seven years. The first night I thought having his company was a blessing. The next day he was shredding the flesh on my back.” His face turned solemn. “But I need to get him off my back forever. Tonight will be my last night with little Jesus.”

She thought his face was drawn and sad like that of a man in mourning. Waving one last time, she walked along the sidewalk. A cold wind blew against her face. The sky was dark, clouds covered the stars and the waning quarter moon. Halfway down the block, she heard a soft popping sound, like a single firecracker going off. She shivered once, wiped her eyes, and squaring her shoulders limped home carrying the bag, heavy with books.

No cars passed, and not another person walked along the pavement. Stopping on the sidewalk outside her house, she looked at the darkened windows but saw only the reflection of the street lamp on their blank surfaces. For the briefest moment she thought she heard a long soft moan, but quickly decided it was only the wind rushing through the bare limbs of the surrounding trees.

“How long are you back for?” It was a question I would be asked a million and one times. “Are you home for good?” was only asked about half a million. “No,” I would tell them. “I’m only home for about two weeks. I go back at the end of the month.” Their faces would sink, a look of pity mixed with disbelief. “You mean you actually have to back there?” I would smile and reassure them, “I do. I don’t want to think about it, I’m home now.”

Two weeks out of the entire year I was a free man. I could do just about anything I wanted within that time. I drank, I smoked, and I thought. I thought a lot. Those nights, if I didn’t pass out first, I would be up going over every detail of where I was, where I wasn’t, and where I just came from. Afghanistan, a country whose name had become a taboo in my small social circle back home in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Often replaced by the term, “over there” or simply, “there.” The thought that I didn’t have the right to be having the time of my life hung heavy on my mind. I knew my brothers and sisters were still over “there” and things wouldn’t be easier on them just because I wasn’t “there.”

“How many people do you think you’ve killed?” Ryan, my friend of almost ten years, asked one night at the dingy bar we chose at random. By that point, I was only two drinks in, more than I had all year, and I felt it. “There’s really no way to tell,” I would say to him every night we went out (which was every night). “The way battles are fought nowadays, you hardly ever see the guys shooting at you. Besides, I’m just Doc, the medic.“ I would come to discover the idea that war isn’t like what you see in video games and movies is surprisingly new to most people. “Well,” he said before taking a swig of his stout. He leaned in a closer, and put his arm around my neck, an attempt to lessen the seriousness of the next question. “How many people have you treated?” “Too many, but it’s what I wanted to do over there.” I felt the flush of annoyance creeping up my neck slowly, and changed the focus to the Celtics losing on TV. I knew people had questions, it’s only natural to wonder about something you’ve never experienced, but I was home. For two weeks, I wasn’t in Afghanistan, I wasn’t a soldier, and I wasn’t over “there” anymore.

There were a few days left of leave, and I meant to make the most of them. I tried to think of things to do that would remind me of the pre-army days. “Let’s go to the movies, I haven’t seen anything new in too long.” As my friends and I waited in line for whichever movie we had chosen, I couldn’t help but take everything in as if going to the movies was something I had never done before. I glanced at a poster for the movie The Expendables. I watched little kids running in and out of the arcade, screaming and laughing, having the time of their lives just being kids. I heard a few of the college kids talking. “This has been the worst week of my life.” A small, blonde girl said to her friend. They both donned crimson hoodies with the logo “UMass” proudly spelled out across the chest. “Tell me about it, I’ve had like three exams in the past four days and still owe an essay.”

The airport was almost entirely empty when we arrived early that morning. I was relieved; I hated walking around in my uniform when there were crowds. My mother and stepfather sat on the opposite side of me at the terminal. Mom was doing her best to keep it together, but her puffy, red stained eyes gave away what she was feeling. “It’s okay, I made it half way. There’s no way I won’t make it through the other half.” I hoped that my upbeat outlook on it would cheer her up, but from the look of it, the only thing she had heard was, “I won’t make it.” As much as I wanted to hug my mom, and make her feel better, I just wanted to get on that plane and get back even more. I love my mom, but I love my platoon just as much. At that moment, I felt they needed me the most. Two weeks was enough, maybe even more than enough. It was enough time for me to see that home wasn’t where I was supposed to be right now. There would come a time, very soon in fact, that I wouldn’t mind being a civilian again. To not have to wear a uniform and stand in formation. Until then, I wanted to be with everyone else, going through the hell of deployment with everyone else. When all the goodbyes were said and I had let my mom hug and kiss her youngest child, her only son, before watching him go off to war for the second time, the plane finally on it’s way, I closed my eyes and slept. For the first time in two weeks, I slept like a baby.
****
Chow time was nearly over, and Garnica was nowhere to be found on the base. He was three years younger than me, and as naïve as they come, but he and I had become the closest of friends, thrown together for being the lowest ranked guys in the platoon, “the fuckin’ new guys.” I searched his bed and the latrine, his two favorite spots. I had been kept later than normal at the aid station, to help stock and clean it, and figured he must have already made off to his third favorite spot, the chow hall.

Tonight was the over-hyped, and long awaited steak and lobster night. Neither were really steak nor lobster, but I didn’t care. Nothing was more important to me that night than stuffing my face with as much fake lobster as humanly possible. When I rounded the corner to the chow hall, I was met with the longest line I had ever seen. I scanned the winding snake up and down until I noticed the short and stocky Garnica, who had saved us a spot in line. There was no mistaking him and his laugh. “About time you showed up,” Garnica said, as he went for his go to greeting, the classic “ball tap.” “Three days away from going home on leave and you think you can just slack off and disappear all day,” he said with a smile.

The fake meat was glorious. The steak looked brown and burnt, the lobster just the right amount of red to make it believable. Slathered in butter, you couldn’t tell the difference.

Time ran on, and the Afghan sun began to sink below the sandy mountain surrounding the base, its orange hue crept through the tiny cracks of the chow tent windows. It blew my mind how beautiful that hellhole of a country could be at times. “What are you going to do on leave? Get a girl pregnant?” Garnica asked, as he undid his belt, to let his gut breathe a sigh of relief. I laughed, “No, bro. I’m not like you.” Garnica shrugged and finished off his plate. “Honestly, I have no idea. It might sound weird… but at this point, I’d rather just stay and get this over with. I wish I had gotten leave earlier. I’m too set on being here now to think about going home for two weeks.” Garnica shook his head and waved his hand until he could muster to swallow his food. “No, man. No, It’s not weird at all. I totally get where you’re coming from. I felt the same way when I went on leave.”

A random BOOOOoooooom rang out and echoed across the base. I say random, but they’re about as normal as it gets in our area of operations. This one was different though. It was close, too close. We sat for a moment to listen more closely, but couldn’t pinpoint where it came from.

“Were those our mortars?” Garnica asked me, with a seriousness you rarely ever see from him. Another rang out, closer than the last. BOOOOoooooom!

“I don’t think so, you can usually tell the difference between outgoing and incoming.” I said, as I scanned the chow hall.

By now, it was mostly cleared out, except the cooks cleaning the mess of plates left behind. “Nobody else seems that concerned about it.” I reassured him, along with myself.

“We should head out to the aid station anyway, I left some of my things there,” he told me, as he got up to leave.

A stray cat that we see around the base had wandered into the chow hall as we began to make our way outside. It was a mangy old thing, tan with patches of fur missing all along it’s torso. As dirty as it was, I couldn’t help but think of my cat back home. I picked some leftover “steak” off my plate and gave it to the eager feline at my feet. “You and cats, man. I don’t get it.” Garnica said, as he gave it a pat on the head. “I’ll be outside smoking, don’t take too long.” That cat was in heaven, purring up a storm and rubbing up against my leg, as if its life depended on it.

BOOOOooooooom. The sound was louder, and closer than ever. The next ten to fifteen minutes are still a blur in my memory. Garnica and I would come to find out much later that upon walking back from the chow hall to the aid station, we had passed right by where the Rocket-Propelled Grenades had been landing without ever realizing it. How could we have missed it? A normal RPG doesn’t leave much carnage behind where it lands, but how could we have not seen the wounded if we had walked by the impact zone? If I hadn’t held us up with feeding the cat, would we have been hit too?

The aid station was empty when we arrived. An eerie sign for sure, but with no clue as to what was actually happening around the base, we carried on as normal and grabbed our things to head back to our tent. “Where the fuck is everyone?” I asked an equally confused Garnica. When we made our exit, I got my answer. The injured and the medics working on them lined the road that, only a few moments ago, when we walked down it, had been completely deserted. Another explosion went off in front of the aid station on the other side of the barrier, which separated the inside of the base from the hostile outside world. I remember hearing the rocks clank and ping off the side of the concrete building and metal doors. The light, ankle-deep dirt, which we referred to as “moon dust,” kicked up into the air and stung my eyes. I didn’t realize it at the time, and wouldn’t until now when I really think back on it, but I was afraid. Not so much for my own well-being, but for everyone else’s out in the road working. I somehow found my bulletproof vest and helmet in all of the chaos before grabbing an aid bag and rushing out to help.

I came upon Sargent Smith hard at work on a casualty. For the few years I had known Smith, I never really liked him all that much. He was lazy and dopey. It drove me crazy how someone like him could get the respected rank of sergeant in todays U. S. Army. After that day though, seeing him so composed, in control, and doing the best he could to save a mans life, I’d argue that you probably couldn’t find a better medic than Smith.

“I need an IV in his arm!” He yelled to me as I came running up. Smith had already been hard at work, putting a tube through the man’s throat in an effort to assist him in breathing. It was a bad scene; the burns and shrapnel wounds covered his face, making him totally unrecognizable. His nametag was the only evidence of who he actually was. It read DynCorp, a company of contractors from the states, sent to help us with equipment upkeep. He wasn’t military, but an ordinary American here to make sure our computers and generators worked properly. The thought wouldn’t bug me until much later when all was said and done.

The sweat running down from my helmet was too much to bear as I attempted to find a vein in the guy’s arm. I didn’t care anymore; a helmet wasn’t going to stop an RPG round anyway. I tore my cumbersome gear off as fast as I could and threw it to the side. If I were going to die, I would die comfortable at least. “I can’t find a vein, he’s lost too much blood and I don’t feel a pulse.” I told Smith as he was beginning to help the man breath with a bag through the tube. I would have to go in through the sternum. I desperately searched for the FAST 1 in the aid bag, a device that has what looks like a million tiny needles. It’s designed to act like an IV, but instead of fluid going into the veins, it goes through the bones of the sternum. I took a deep breath with the FAST 1 in hand. I had practiced this same medical skill thousands of times on dummies, so that I could do it right at this very moment. I didn’t hesitate, bringing it down with two hands, square on the chest. It made a sickening thump, but it worked. Fluid was moving, and after a few moments the pulse returned.

It was and still is one of the greatest feelings in my entire life followed by the second greatest, quickly after, when he stopped breathing. I bagged him as fast as I could, hyperventilating him to make up for the loss of air until he began to breathe on his own again. We had just saved this mans life, twice. Smith gave me a pat on the back and smiled before turning back to the casualty. “Hang in there, buddy. We’re here for you. Keep fighting,” Smith reassured him, as I continued to bag. I doubted he could hear Smith’s words until I felt his vitals start to get stronger; I leaned in closer and told him, “Stay with us.”

It wasn’t until the worst had passed that I heard the conversation behind us. “He’s gone, there’s nothing we can do anymore.” It was Sergeant Roberson. One of the smallest females you’ll ever see, and there she was, reassuring a man in tears, ten times her size. The other contractor they had been working on didn’t make it. “There has to be something you can do!” The man yelled at her, as she shook her head and began covering the body with a blanket. Garnica was across the road from me, covering up the body of the contractor he had been working on. I had never seen him so expressionless, and I couldn’t bring myself to feel as happy as I was ten seconds ago.

The hours that followed were some of the toughest of my entire deployment. This would be the first time we lost any American casualties in our aid station. We were still kicking ourselves for having two local Afghan nationals die on our table a few weeks before, and now this. We had saved six out of the nine critically wounded, but we weren’t ready to call that a victory by any means. “You medics are the finest in the entire unit, I want you to know that.” The Commander would tell us and we would smile and shake his hand. Nobody truly felt like it. Garnica and I hung around the back of the aid station after most of the medics had left to go to bed. We both had our headphones on, listening to anything that would help take our minds off the day. Blame It On Bad Luck began to play in my ear. “I don’t want to go on leave.” I told him. “Really? Even after all of this shit?” he said somberly. “Because of that shit,” I replied. He sat down next to me in silence and we both just smoked in the dark for the next hour or so. He finally spoke up as we began to make our way to bed, shattering the quiet that finally fell upon the day. “Don’t worry, bro. I’ll hold down the fort until you get back.”

My grandmother had a Bakelite Philco radio, model 48-250, brown with gold numerals on the dial. Its five tubes received the AM band and operated on 115 volts. I remember little about her, just that she wore black dresses with small white polka dots, pulled her white hair into a bun at the back of her head, and sat every Sunday afternoon in a wooden rocker in a corner of her living room, two massive bookcases behind her, rocking and listening to the weekly broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera. She seemed ancient, but she was the same age I am now. Style and the cultures of the times differentiate us. She never would have considered wearing slacks to work, and until recently, if anyone asked me, I would have been certain there was nothing unusual about her life. Now I am unsure.

We were not allowed to interrupt her opera. From Milton Cross’s opening words until he signed off at the end of the broadcast, my brother Pete and I were expected to sit on the floor quietly playing with the wooden blocks we would dump from a threadbare bag she kept in a closet on the far side of the room as she sat with her eyes closed, smiling and straining to hear tinny music coming from the tiny speaker that sat less than three feet from her ears.

“It’s so boring,” Pete said to Mother one Sunday evening as we drove back to our house after a long afternoon at Gram’s. “Why do we have to sit around while she listens to that stuff? She doesn’t seem to know we’re there.”

“She knows,” Mother said. “She believes you should be exposed to the finer things of life.”

“Like those bellowing cows and bulls screeching from her radio,” Pete said. Pete is older than me by seven years, and I admired his precision in summing up how we both felt every Sunday as we played with blocks on the Oriental rug in Gram’s living room, hearing but not listening to the thin stream of sound coming from the corner where she rocked and smiled and listened to that old Philco.

“Listening to the opera and knowing you’re hearing it as well gives her great pleasure,” Mother said.

Having spent my adult life teaching music in a rural western Massachusetts high school, I have come to understand my grandmother’s hope that we might eventually share her love of opera and symphonic music, as well as the disappointment she certainly felt as Pete and I tried to ignore Verdi and Puccini and Wagner as we built wooden towers and knocked them down, the blocks clattering to the rug. My students text, play video games, and mutter softly into their cell phones when they think I am not paying attention. At seventy-three, Pete is a struggling jazz saxophonist and singer, still waiting tables to pay the costs of traveling the country to play low paying gigs in small clubs and on college campuses. We never speak of it, but I am sure his frustrations when he plays a club with less than ten people in the audience reminds him in some manner of how Gram must have felt when a four foot tower of blocks crashed in the middle of an aria.

Gram died in ’68. I was having the most exciting and interesting time of my life as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, working with Quechua speaking Indian families in the Comuna San Jacinto. News of her death did not reach me until two months after her funeral. Pete, I later found out, was living north of Mendocino in a hippie commune whose members were forbidden to have anything to do with the world outside the three hundred acres that had been donated to them by the parents of the commune’s founder. Telephones, mail service, and visitors were taboo. Like me, for very different reasons, he knew nothing of Gram’s death until months after her burial. For both of us, she became but an occasionally remembered part of our personal ancient histories.

Last year, Mother fell ill. She was in her nineties and had been living in the home she and Dad had built in ’72. Unable to care for herself, Pete and I convinced her to move into a quasi-independent living situation at Edgehill Manor, a home for the elderly in Greenfield, where I live with my husband, Harry. It was a difficult decision for her, as well as for me. Pete, ever peripatetic, was unfazed by it. Mother adjusted to the situation, although not graciously. I visited her daily, and Pete would stop by to see her whenever he had a gig in the area, or as close to the area as New York, Boston or Albany, which is three for four times a year.

“I hate going into a nursing home,” she said the day I moved her.

“It’s an extended care facility,” I said.

She laughed. “It’s a goddamn nursing home. They ought to call this place Over the Hill Manor. That’s what happens when old folks stand at the edge of a hill. They fall over. You do know, don’t you, that these places are all owned by the same people who own the funeral homes? There’s a hell of a term for you, funeral homes. Homes are where people live, eat, and sleep. The only people lying down in funeral homes are dead. Nursing homes are the stepping stones to funeral homes, both of them owned and run by undertakers. They keep hearses in the garage, and back them up to the delivery door every time somebody kicks the bucket.”

I laughed back. “That’s bullpucky. The undertakers don’t own the nursing homes.”

“They certainly do,” she said.

For the most part, that was the end of her complaining, except for the first thing she always said every time I visited her.

“I hate this effing place, Linda. I effing hate it.”

I would rest a hand on her shoulder each day. “You don’t hate it enough to really say the F word; give it its full and appreciative pronunciation.”

Each day, she would drop the subject and with a smile ask about the kids, about Harry, always the opener for any conversation we might have. We would chat for an hour, sometimes two, before I went home to the dinner Harry prepared each evening, knowing that my time with Mother was important to both of us, and that it could not last much longer.

Recently, just as I finished my ten o’clock sophomore music appreciation class, I got a call from the nursing station at Edgehill Manor. Mother was unconscious; her breathing was shallow, and she was unresponsive. It looked as though she might not live through the day. An hour later, after making arrangements with the school to cover my classes, I drove to Edgehill. Walking through the door of Mother’s room I saw her sitting in her chair, a copy of the New York Times opened to the editorial pages on her lap.

She was pale and frail looking, wearing only her pajamas and a robe. Always before when I visited her, she would be dressed and wearing make-up, her thin white hair brushed and carefully arranged. Still, she managed a smile and shook her head. “I’m glad you’re here dear. I have things to tell you that can’t wait.”

“Well here I am, Mommy.” I kissed her cheek.

“You haven’t called me that in a long time.” She reached up and touched my hand.

“It’s a way of telling you I love you.”

Her smile was brief, but it lit up her face. “You look haggard, dear.”

“I rushed from a class to get here. They said you weren’t well.”

“I’m not, but that can’t be all they said to get you to drop everything and come here in the middle of a school day. They told you I was dying, didn’t they?”

“I won’t lie to you.”

“You never could, not even when you’d sneak out your bedroom window and climb down from the porch roof to go meet that awful boy, Danny Patch.”

“Flatch,” I said, surprised that she knew about my sneaking around at night and had never before mentioned it. “Vinnie Flatch. And he wasn’t awful. He’s a state representative now.”

“And that’s not awful?” We both laughed, a touch of color rising back into her face. “I am dying, you know, not quickly or dramatically, but a little bit at a time. It’s like I’ve got a slow leak and there’s this constant loss of air and there’s nothing that can patch it.”

I started to say something, but she shook her head, raising her open hand, and I knew from a lifetime of experience to bite back my words. I pulled a folding metal chair across the room and sat facing her and reached for her hands. She rested them in mine and patted my fingers.

“It’s not so terrible, Linda. Like Dr. Ross said to me this morning, I’m old old.” She giggled. “Of course I told him he was an unconscionable bastard, talking to me like that. He’s only eighty, you know.”

I held her hands tight in mine. “Is this the way it was for you with Gram? I’m so sorry I wasn’t here with you for that.”

Dropping my hands, she fell back in her chair, laughing hard, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Nothing my mother did was like the way anybody else would do the same thing, even dying, and it’s fine that you weren’t there. You were doing important things and living your life, just like Gram wanted for you and Peter both.”

“She was a piece of work, wasn’t she?”

“Like nobody else, and that’s what I need to talk to you about.” Mother sat forward, and reaching again for my hands, she looked around the room as if to be certain that we were alone. She spoke in a near whisper. “Your grandmother, my mother, once grew a pair of wings. She told me that she woke up the morning of her twenty-second birthday with a terrible backache. The pain was so severe that she had to struggle to get out of bed. When she managed to get up and started to take off her pajamas the top caught on something. Tugging at it as she tried to slip it over her head caused her shoulder blades to hurt terribly, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw a small pair of wings growing from them.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “And that’s when Gram discovered that she was an angel.”

“Your grandmother was certainly no angel,” Mother said. “But she swore to me on her love for her children that she grew wings on her twenty-second birthday.”

Mother’s hands were smooth and soft, not rough from work as they had been when I was a girl, and she gardened, harvested, and chopped wood with my father, raised chickens, and did all the things a woman on a farm had to do to keep things running and food on the table. I rubbed her palms with my fingers. “Okay, Ma. So Gram was a demon with wings.”

She pulled her hands away. “I don’t appreciate your sarcasm. I never did. My mother was neither an angel nor a demon. She was a person like any other.”

I rolled my eyes. “Except that she grew a pair of wings.”

“I saw you do that thing with your eyes, Linda Ann Miller. I don’t like that anymore than I do your sarcasm. Your grandmother had wings for a time.”

“Did you see them?”

She scoffed. “Of course not. I wasn’t born until she was twenty-five.”

“The wings were gone by then?”

“She said they were gone by the time she was twenty-four.”

I laughed and kissed her cheek. “When did you start telling stories, Ma?”

“This is not a story. I’m telling you something very important, very illuminating about my mother, your grandmother.”

“Why now? Why didn’t you tell us years ago?” I asked the question to humor her, to allow her mind to run free with the fantasy it was constructing. I did not want to challenge her and risk upsetting her in the fragile condition that had brought me racing to Edgehill.

“I never told Peter because I knew he wouldn’t understand it, let alone believe me. I never told you because you were always busy and practical, helping build water systems in Ecuador, studying to be a teacher and then teaching, then you became a mother, a wife, a member of the town planning board. I was sure that someone as grounded as you would think I had gone around the bend if I told you about my mother’s wings.”

I was sure she was either pulling my leg—or Gram had pulled hers—or she was suffering from some form of dementia. She read my doubt it in my expression.

“I am not crazy, so wipe that look off your face, young lady.”

“I’m not young, and you haven’t said that to me since I was a teenager.”

Mother grunted. “Just listen. Your grandmother’s wings grew a little each day. After a week, they were a foot long and had brilliant blue-green feathers. Two weeks later, they had grown to three feet in length. She said they were resplendent.”

“Like a quetzal’s feathers.” I surprised myself by speaking suddenly, without thinking.

She arched her eyebrows, a silent question.

“A bird,” I said.

“I assumed it was a bird, since we’re talking about feathers. I never heard of it.”

“It was considered divine by the Aztecs and Maya who believed it was associated with Quetzalcoatl, a god who could appear as a feathered serpent or a human warrior.”

“Gram was no god,” she said. “Or goddess for that matter.”

“He was the son of the earth and he somehow mediated between the two. It was never clear to me just how that worked.”

“Sounds as ridiculous as any religious clap-trap. It probably didn’t work.”

“Why are you telling me all this, especially now?”

“Because I’m dying. I almost died this morning. Now I feel,” she paused and looked at me, her eyes red-rimmed, her voice weak. “I feel adequately well enough to tell you all of this. I don’t want it to be forgotten, and if I don’t tell you now and I die tonight, the story of my mother’s, your grandmother’s wings will be forgotten forever.”

“People must have known at the time,” I said, wondering as I did why I was trying to make sense of my mother’s story about her mother.

She shook her head. “Nobody knew. Mother took to wearing loose clothing in order to hide them. She said her friends thought she was getting fat, and her mother was afraid for a while that she was pregnant, but she managed to keep the wings a secret. When they were fully developed, she would go flying at first light. Being careful to keep away from towns and cities where people would be most likely to see her, she confined her flights to the least populated areas of the western hills. The times she said she most cherished came when she was gliding over snow covered fields, a full moon reflecting from her feathers, their iridescent green changing the color of the world.”

The poetry of her description was unlike Mother, and realizing she must have been quoting Gram’s words as she remembered them, I suspended my disbelief. “That would be lovely,” I said.

She began to cough and small droplets of blood appeared on her lips. Fetching a glass of water from the small bathroom attached to her room, I dampened the corner of a wash cloth and wiped the blood away.

“I’m thirsty,” she said. I handed her the glass, and as she raised it to drink, it slipped from her fingers and spilled over her knees and the floor.

“Let me help you change out of those wet clothes,” I said.

She shook her head, and there was a note of urgency in her voice. “I’m terribly tired, dear. Let me finish my story and then I’m going to go back to bed. I have to tell you everything I can remember of what Mother told me.”

I nodded, worried that she was so tired. In all the years I had known her she had always been the first person in the house to be up and dressed. This also had been true since she moved to Edgehill Manor. The staff nick-named her Early Bird, and often remarked about how she would be dressed and in the common room reading her New York Times and Greenfield Recorder hours before the night shift gave way to the day workers. Now she seemed to be growing weaker as she spoke, as if she were marshaling the last of her strength to tell me Gram’s story.

“The wings lasted two years,” she said. “And in that time Mother flew as much as she could, ever careful that no one would see her. The second summer of her wings, she and several friends took a trip to Europe. Once the boat landed, they visited Paris and Rome, and spent a week in Venice and another in Florence. Then she parted ways with them and took a train down to a little town in Tuscany, Rada, I think she said, and she spent the rest of the summer and into the first weeks of September living with a family there. She told me she had made the arrangements through mutual friends.

“She flew every day. No one said anything about it, and she was never absolutely sure whether anyone saw her flying over the Tuscan hills. If they did, perhaps the Italians were more accepting of such miracles than Americans would have been. Here men would have tried to shoot her down, and preachers would have railed against demons and dragons. In Tuscany that year there was a spurt in reported sightings of angels and the Virgin Mary.”

“This is a hell of a tale, Ma.”

She narrowed her lips and eyes. “I told you once, this is not a story, dear. I don’t tell stories. This is true.”

I half smiled. Mother never was one to tell us stories. Our father was the spinner of wild and imaginary events. “There’s always a first time.”

“I saw the scars.” Her voiced was hushed and terribly serious. “Minute scars on each shoulder blade where the wings had been. She showed them to me a few days before she died, and said that it was important for me to know what had happened to her. She also made me promise to tell you before I died.”

“What happened when she came home from Europe?”

“She married your grandfather.”

“Wings and all?”

“The wings were gone. She met my father on the voyage back. He was returning from Rome where he had been studying architecture for a year. I’ve seen their pictures from the trip. He was quite dashing and she was radiant and beautiful, even in the bulky clothes she wore to hide her wings. They fell in love, and when they were one day out from New York, he proposed. She told him she’d think about it and write him with her answer. He pleaded for her to say yes immediately, but Mother had to think about how to handle the problems presented by her wings.”

“But she said yes. We know that.”

Mother dabbed at her wet knees with the dry part of washcloth. “She did, but only after the wings were gone.”

“What happened to them?” I was surprised by the sense of loss I felt.

“Over the next several weeks they became smaller and smaller, their color fading even faster until they were a dingy gray. One morning, she woke up and they were gone. She looked carefully through the bed covers and all she found were two small pieces of gristle, like something you’d spit out while chewing a chicken drumstick. That morning, she sent Father a telegram with a single word. Yes.”

“What does this mean, this story?”

“It doesn’t mean a damn thing, Linda Ann Miller. It’s what happened. Things that happen don’t mean anything more than what we make them mean.” She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes, her breathing shallow and rapid. “I could use another drink.”

I refilled the glass with water from the bathroom sink and holding the back of her head with one hand, helped her take a sip.

“I’d rather have a pint of vodka,” she said.

“I don’t know about a full pint at one time, but I’ll sneak you in a bottle of good potato vodka tonight.”

“That would be wonderful.” She opened her eyes wide. “You’re coming back tonight? You never come back at night when you’ve been here in the day. Should I be worried? Did they tell you something they haven’t told me?”

“No.”

“They told you I was dying?”

“You told me.”

“They told me. I’m dying.” She sighed and gave me an air kiss. “It’s about time. The damned undertakers that own this place are getting impatient. They can make money on my funeral and rent the room to somebody else at a higher rate.”

“Do really believe that undertakers own nursing homes?”

“Extended care facility. Edgehill is an extended care facility, not a nursing home. You told me that, and no, I don’t believe undertakers really own it. That’s just a metaphor.”

“And yet you say the story about Gram’s wings is true.”

“She swore to me it that really happened. Your grandmother always spoke the truth, and now I’ve told you. You must be sure to tell Eva when the time comes, and convince her to make sure she passes it on to Wendy when she believes it’s the right time. It’s an important part of our family history.”

“Why not tell Wendy while she’s still young?”

“It wouldn’t be the right time. It’s too tragic for the young.”

I bought a large bottle of Luksusowa vodka on my way home from Edgehill, but I never took it to Mother. Less than half an hour after walking through my front door, the phone rang. It was Mynah Forsythe, the day nurse on Mother’s floor. We had gone to high school together.

“She died,” Mynah said. “I went in to check on her, and she was sitting in her chair dead.”

My heart thumped, but all I could think of to say was, “How did she look?”

“Look? She was dead, Lin. She looked dead.”

“Other than looking dead, how did she appear? Pained? Frightened? Ghastly? I want to know how my mother died, not physically what killed her. She was old old, just like Dr. Ross said to her this morning. How did she face death, and was it a good death?”

“Death is never good, Lin. Death sucks. I’ve seen enough of it working here. Death truly sucks. I can’t tell you exactly what hers was like since nobody was with her when she went, but when I saw her afterwards your mother was smiling. Her face was turned toward the window, and her head was tilted up as if she’d been looking at the sky. Her eyes were open, and she was smiling. A big smile. A generous smile.”

That was on a Wednesday. We buried her on Saturday. It was a warm and sunny day in the middle of May. The trees were in full bud, their soft colors like those of autumn, but filled with the promise of life’s breadth and richness. Lilacs were in bloom, their scent heavy in the air as we stood around the grave and listened to a Unitarian minister who had never met Mother, and whom we had met for the first time the day before because my daughter Eva, weeping, told me that she wanted words to be said at Mother’s internment.

He was very nice, and his words were kind and appropriate, based on the notes he had carefully taken when we hired him to speak. He didn’t pray. He didn’t preach. He didn’t offer homilies about death, nor did he read from the Bible. He talked about Mother, referencing the many things Eva and I had told him about her, and he talked about love and family and what he called the ineffable mystery of human existence. He concluded with the final lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, “This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong; to love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

We stood there, each of us with a hand on the coffin for several long minutes after the graveside service ended and everyone else had gone, leaving us alone for our final moments with what remained of Mother. A small, orange Kubota backhoe idled with a soft thrum thirty feet away inside the tree line at the edge of the cemetery property. Alongside it, three men with shovels and rakes stood quietly in the shadows.

“I like that, the ineffable mystery of human existence,” Eva said.

“I thought it trite,” Harry said. “No one should try to wrap words around the chaos and meaninglessness of this crawl across the dirt that we call life.”

“You just did,” Eva said. “The difference is that you did it ugly.”

Harry wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and drew her into a tight sideways hug. “That doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

“I know. You’re just being the dad.”

The moment was broken. Harry’s hand had been the first to move from the coffin lid, and moments later, the rest of us followed. We walked across the spring green grass to the far side of the cemetery where the cars were parked. Behind us, I heard the Kubota’s motor rev up, and when I turned to look, I saw three men walking slowly toward the gravesite, shovels over their shoulders.

We went to our house where we sat around telling family stories. I did not mention my grandmother’s wings. Later that evening, we ordered pizza from the Village Pizza shop, which John insists makes the best pizza in New England, if not the entire northeast. I opened the Luksusowa, and we drained the bottle. The evening was funny and sad, filled with silly songs and tears. It was after eleven when Eva and her family left. Harry stayed up with me talking for another hour, and I stayed up long after Harry had gone to bed.

I could still hear Mother’s voice. The dead leave us slowly, but I knew the day would come when I would have trouble remembering how she looked, exactly; how she laughed, exactly; how she moved around the house, exactly. That night, I sat and let her phantom voice waft through the room, hearing again the story of my grandmother’s wings as Mother remembered her telling it. I found a half a bottle of pinot grigio in the refrigerator and drank it as I listened. When the wine was gone, the story ended. I climbed the stairs toward the bedroom Harry and I have shared for forty-five years. I put my hand on the door knob and stood outside the room for at least five minutes before letting it drop to my side, opting instead for one of the guest rooms, just this one night. I stripped off my clothes, and took a long shower, hot water pouring deliciously over me.

Twenty minutes later, clean and dry, I stood naked in front of the hall mirror, six feet high, two feet wide with a simulated ormolu oak leaf and acorn frame. Holding a hand mirror up to my eyes, I studied my back and saw the shoulder blades of a sixty-six year old woman, skin mottled by a lifetime of careless sunning. Stepping closer to the large mirror, I looked painstakingly at my skin, trying to see what I feared could not be there and what, if they were there, had long since been lost to memory. I saw what anyone, with the exception of my grandmother, would see on their back; certainly not the tiny tell-tale scars I had fancied I might find, indications that I too could once have sprouted wings and soared above the hills of western Massachusetts and looked down on farms and woodlands, flown over villages and towns like my marvelous and inexplicable grandmother, free for a moment of gravity’s most demanding ties, becoming for a brief moment of life a miraculous being flying, flying, flying on resplendent green and iridescent human wings.